Ferguson Enterprises · 2022 Solo service designer

Designing the process, not just the prototype

The case in 6 moves

Direction, not a target
Three participant layers
Eight evaluation principles
What the process surfaced
Method, not solution
The team runs it solo

7-phase

framework, built live

evaluation principles

Branch-led

team runs it solo

Client: Ferguson Enterprises
Role: Solo service designer
Team: Embedded part-time with Ferguson CX · SME Advisory Group (ops, sales, merchandising, CX) · two Ideation Teams → Prototyping Teams · internal service design lead
Duration: Dec 2021 – Jul 2022 (8 months)
Deliverables: 7-phase service design framework · 3-layer participant structure · 8 Counter Experience Principles · Pro Pickup service blueprint · 2 live branch prototypes
Outcome: Both prototypes met all design criteria and kept running post-engagement; branch leads extending without being asked; CX team equipped to run the process independently

Ferguson came with a direction, not a problem: improve the customer's experience during Pro Pickup. That brief is the beginning of the design work, not the specification. Before any prototype could be worth testing, the engagement needed a structure that could surface the right problem — and that would let the people who'd eventually run any solution help design it. This case is about the process I built to do that. The seven-phase framework, the three-layer participant structure, the eight evaluation principles: these are what made the prototypes findable. They're also what the CX team can run again without me in the room.

Chapter 01

A slippery brief that needed a process before it could become a target

"Perception of waiting" sounds like a problem but isn't yet a design target. It doesn't say where the wait is happening, what's causing it, which customers it's costing the most, or what a fix would actually need to accomplish. Before I could prototype anything useful, I needed a way to find the actual problem.

I built the investigation structure while running it. Seven phases: Monitor and Frame, Explore and Identify, Ideate and Visualize, Prototype and Envision, Experiment, Refine, Optimize. The sequence exists for a reason. Monitor and Frame isn't background research — it's defining what "better" would actually mean for this context, with the people who know it. Without that grounding, a prototype risks solving for the wrong thing with high fidelity.

The decision to build the framework explicitly — to name each phase, design the activities for it, and run the whole engagement as a demonstration of a repeatable method — wasn't in the original brief. It became load-bearing when it became clear that the goal wasn't just to fix the Pro Pickup. It was to give Ferguson's CX team the tools to keep finding things worth fixing.

Affinity-clustering board grouping post-it notes into themes: Ease, Modes of interaction, TRUST, Speed, Efficiency and simplicity, We value you — the synthesis behind the eight Counter Experience Principles. — Synthesis behind the Counter Experience Principles — one of the upstream outputs that grounded every evaluation decision that followed.

Chapter 02

Three participant layers that kept field knowledge in the design

The most common failure mode in service design engagements is that the people closest to the problem aren't in the room when the solutions are made. I structured the participant groups to close that gap from the start, deliberately.

Three layers worked in sequence and fed each other. An SME Advisory Group — drawn from store operations, sales, merchandising, and CX — gave continuous feedback across every phase. These were the people who knew what was operationally possible, who would tell me immediately if a concept was naive. Beneath them, two Ideation Teams ran in parallel, one per scenario, generating concepts through Crazy 8s, Round Robin, affinity mapping, and elevator pitches. Those teams later evolved into Prototyping Teams that took the strongest concepts and built them into testable services.

The cadence was a couple of hours of facilitated work each month, mostly remote, anchored in Miro. Every workshop board, activity, and toolkit was designed from scratch for this engagement. By the time the prototyping teams were presenting their own work — their concepts, their metrics, their arguments for why the solution would hold — they were no longer participants in someone else's process. They were running one they understood.

It gives us a better way to look at things and help us along the process. Not telling us what to do, but helping you figure out what you want to do.

— Kevin Sills, Round Rock branch lead

Chapter 03

Eight evaluation principles the team is still using

The Counter Experience Principles were the most durable output of the engagement's first half. Eight principles surfaced through workshop synthesis: enable a frictionless ordering experience, value time, enable project success, in the moment, trusted advisor, unlock expert collaboration with information, provide value from start to finish, and a partnership principle about being valued rather than transacted with.

Their function shifted as the engagement progressed. At the start, they were a synthesis output — a summary of what the field staff said mattered in the Pro Pickup experience. By the middle of the engagement, they had become the rubric the prototyping teams used to evaluate every concept they developed. Every prototype was assessed against them before testing. Both final prototypes met all their criteria.

That shift from deliverable to working standard is worth naming. Principles written by a consultant and handed to a team are easy to set aside when the consultant leaves. Principles the team derived themselves, and then practiced using as an evaluation tool across multiple rounds of concept work, become the language they reach for when a new idea shows up. The rubric is now how the CX team argues about whether something is worth testing.

Seven-phase framework — process diagram

The seven-phase framework — Monitor & Frame through Optimize. Each phase was designed explicitly so the CX team could run it themselves on a future engagement.

Chapter 04

Two service breakdowns the process surfaced, two working prototypes

Customer insights work surfaced five Wait Time Scenarios. The SME Advisory Board, using the Counter Experience Principles as their evaluation frame, picked the two that mattered most. Neither was about the duration of the wait. Both were moments where the wait turned into something worse: a broken commitment, or an absence of acknowledgment in a space where the customer had every right to expect one.

The prototyping teams designed the solutions. Make-It-Happen in Round Rock targeted Order Not Ready — a coordination system with three working parts that prevented the gap between what was promised at ordering and what was ready at pickup. KnockKnock in Tamarac targeted Associate Not Present — a doorbell-and-intercom system paired with an SOP that ensured no customer arrived to an empty pickup area. Both were tested live with real customers. Both met all their design criteria.

The prototypes are documented in detail in the outputs-focused version of this case. What matters here is how they were found: through a structured process that pointed the field staff at the right problem before anyone reached for a solution.

Round Rock concept-development canvas for Make-It-Happen, showing the prototype's three working components and how they address the Order Not Ready scenario. — Make-It-Happen — designed by the Round Rock prototyping team using the seven-phase process and evaluated against the Counter Experience Principles.

The reframe

The brief asked for a solution. The engagement needed a method.

You can design a solution to a specific service breakdown and hand it over. A branch gets a new coordination system. Another gets a doorbell. Both work. Both eventually drift, because the conditions around them change and there's no shared understanding of why they worked in the first place. Or you can design the conditions under which a team can find service breakdowns themselves, evaluate them against a shared rubric, and test solutions they built. The second answer is harder to explain in a brief. It's also what determines whether the work outlasts the engagement. Ferguson didn't need better waiting areas. They needed a way to keep noticing when something had broken — and a method for deciding what to do about it.

What stays behind

A process the CX team can run without me in the room

Both prototypes kept running past the engagement. The Round Rock team started extending Make-It-Happen into nearby non-WMS locations without being asked. Branch leads proposed cross-pollination — trying each other's prototypes — before anyone on the Harmonic side had suggested it. That didn't happen because the prototypes were handed over with clear instructions. It happened because the teams had been in the process that found the problem and built the solution. They understood the logic, not just the output.

The CX leadership read on the engagement named what the process had produced: a quick, low-cost way to test whether something is worth exploring further, that brings field staff and HQ into the same room and produces visibility in both directions. That's a capability description, not a project outcome. The seven-phase framework, the participant-layer structure, the Counter Experience Principles as evaluation rubric: these are the pieces. The CX team now has all of them.

We have gone light years ahead in our communication by not just leaving them to work it out for themselves.

— Kevin Sills, Round Rock branch lead